Opinion

Make in India? It will take more than just subsidies

  Last week, while inaugurating a new aircraft factory in western India, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned to a slogan he coined a few months after taking power in 2014: “Make in India.” This time, however, he added: “Make for the world.” This isn’t the first time Modi has gestured toward India’s need to increase manufacturing exports. Still, the ...

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Musk’s superpowers are being ignored

There’s a lot of focus on Elon Musk’s Twitter Inc. purchase and plans to turn around the troubled social network. Most debates around the acquisition miss a crucial tenent of Musk’s glittering track record: He uses software to drive previously unimaginable advances in difficult problems, and then creates a virtuous spiral with investors and users. This approach is critical to ...

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Inflation doves want it both ways with CPI quirk

  For much of the past year, interest rate doves have been eager to make excuses for inflation, blaming obscure methodological quirks in the US’s consumer price index for a stretch of concerning reports. Now, another of those peculiarities is pulling reported inflation down, but the doves are happy to look the other way. While there were certainly positive developments ...

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The wild west of crypto claims another victim

  Sam Bankman-Fried has in the past enjoyed media treatment akin to walking on water. Even amid the brutal cryptocurrency selloff, his exchange FTX was hailed as the buyer of last resort amid the wreckage. His geeky image, supposedly philanthropic motivations and crude online gags softened the edges of a billionaire whose business is risky crypto trading — most of ...

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Why Australia is gearing up for possible war with China

  Japan is America’s single most important ally, but Australia has historically been its most reliable. Alone among US allies, not just in the Indo-Pacific but globally, Australia has fought in all of America’s major wars since World War I. As I found during three days in Sydney and Canberra, the prospect of war in the Taiwan Strait is forging ...

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Data can unleash new green investment

  Economies are growing rapidly across the developing world, which is producing a dramatic increase in energy demand. A central challenge facing leaders is how to meet that growing demand — and deliver electricity to the nearly 1 billion people who still lack it — while also phasing out the power source that is a primary driver of climate change ...

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We have Paxlovid Covid data. Now we need more

  A new study that mined health records from the Department of Veterans Affairs hints that the drug Paxlovid might be useful in preventing long Covid. Scientists have been urging the government and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, to study the idea that lingering virus could be the culprit behind some people’s long-term symptoms, and finally having data is a welcome ...

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Big Tech layoffs deflate Musk and Zuckerberg

  Restructuring is a horrible time for the staff of any company, but it’s also an opportunity to concentrate on what reliably makes money. Elon Musk has made cuts so deep at Twitter Inc. that his team has started asking dozens of workers to return after being laid off last Friday, when about half of them were shown the door. ...

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A G-20 talking shop in Bali? It’s no bad thing

The Group of 20 countries meet in Bali against the backdrop of heightened tension between the world’s great powers, nuclear threats and a looming global recession. With his military campaign in Ukraine faltering, Russia’s Vladimir Putin will be absent. A joint statement is unlikely, a significant breakthrough to solve concurrent crises in energy, climate and food would be a miracle. ...

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Kids love TikTok for reason others fear it

  TikTok is a happy place. From cute kitties to lip-syncing stars, the Chinese short-video service is a place where people go to entertain and to be delighted. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, the site is abjectly apolitical. Yet, politicians increasingly find it quite objectionable. This is not dichotomous. What makes TikTok so harmonious is also the very thing that attracts ...

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